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Earth with No Moon
Astrobiology Magazine has an interesting essay on how different the Earth would be without our unusually large moon to keep us company. Everything from the axis of rotation to the climate is influenced. The essay gets a little murky toward the end with its dip into the social impact of the Moon’s existence, but it’s…
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Earth Two
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted a belt of warm dust swirling around the young star HD 113766. It’s about 424 light-years away, and the formation is interesting because the star is just a bit larger than our sun and the dust belt is right in the sweet spot where temperatures will sustain liquid water.…
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Beep…Beep…Beep…
On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I. The world’s first artificial satellite was about the size of a basketball, weighed 183 pounds, and took about 98 minutes to orbit the Earth. Sputnik is 50 today. Link
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Are Manned Missions Passe?
This article brings up an interesting argument: Manned space missions are more dangerous and costly than mechanical ones. “Intelligent” robots and satellites can do a pretty good job exploring other planets, they’re much less fragile than humans, and you don’t have to worry about bringing them back safely. The romance of manned missions aside, does…
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The Ten Strangest Things in Space
David Bowie, oddly, is not amongst them. Orbiting Frog’s list, unlike the recent Space.com list, consists of “real” objects instead of the largely computer-simulated ones that Space.com featured. I find the picture of the “blob” in the Orion Nebula oddly creepy, but I honestly can’t put my finger on why. Link (via The Presurfer)
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Your Birthday Star
The Birthday Stars generator finds stars whose distance matches your age in light-years from Earth. So if you’re 35 years, 6 months old, the generator will give you the name and location of a star that is 35.5 light years away. Your stars will (obviously) change over time, as you get older and light from…
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Google Sponsors Moon Landing
As I said in a previous post, if I had to put money on who’d be running things in 20 years, it’d be Google. Google Inc. is bankrolling a $30 million out-of-this-world prize to the first private company that can safely land a robotic rover on the moon and beam back a gigabyte of images…
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Galaxiki – Editable Online Galaxy
Galaxiki is a collaborative fictional online galaxy. Essentially, it’s a wiki for creating fantasy planets, nebulae, solar systems, and what-have-you, all in a shared galaxy. Neat! Link (via BoingBoing)
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Flashes in the sky
It wasn’t as spectacular as I hoped, but I watched the Aurigids meteor shower this morning. Saw about 15 really good ones in a half hour period. I wonder when my neighbor will discover that his security lightbulb has been, um, loosened? <G>
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NASA Photo Archives to be Available Online
NASA has partnered with the Internet Archive to build a giant, free, online repository of still and moving images from its enormous collection. Here’s a link to a CNET article about the deal, although Cory Doctorow notes that the article gets one important fact wrong: The agreement is nonexclusive, as agreements with government agencies should…